Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✩✩✩
by David Yee, directed by Nina Lee Aquino
Factory Theatre & fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
November 3-27, 2016
“Like a 17-hour flight in economy”
It is unusual to have two plays running at the same time in Toronto featuring the same plot set-up. Mouthpiece by Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken (closing on November 6) and Acquiesce by David Yee (previewing from October 29) both focus on a character who is reluctant to deliver the eulogy at a parent’s funeral. While Mouthpiece is dynamic and highly theatrical, Acquiesce is plodding and only intermittently theatrical. Acquiesce is twice as long as Mouthpiece but seems to have only half as much to say. It manages to feel in only two hours like a 17-hour flight in economy.
The first among the play’s many flaws is that far too much of the action, including the basic premise, is improbable. Sin Hwang (David Yee), a Canadian whose background is half Chinese and half European, considers himself a writer even though he has produced only one slim novel and a collection of short stories. What is actual income derives from is unknown. Sin has been estranged from his father, an immigrant from Hong Kong, for the past fifteen years. They have had so little contact that it is Sin’s girlfriend Nine (Rosie Simon), who first learns of Sin’s father’s death and has to tell him about it.
Sin’s father has made his nephew Kai (Richard Lee), who lives in Hong Kong, the executor of his will which states that he wants to have his funeral in Hong Kong and wants to have Sin deliver the eulogy. If we assume, as the play suggests, that Sin is at least 30 years old and was born in Canada that means that his father has lived in Canada as a farmer for more than 30 years. Since it is perfectly possible to have a Buddhist funeral in Canada, why, if Sin’s participation is so important, would Sin’s father insist on having his funeral in a country from which he emigrated so long ago? Besides that, since Sin’s father knows that his brother did not like him and that Kai, his brother’s son, dislikes him even more, why would he make someone like Kai, whom he barely knows and who lives out of the country, his executor? That kind of situation is what lawyers are for.
To make matters even less believable, once Sin arrives in Hong Kong, Kai refuses to help him even though Sin’s father’s will is in Chinese, which Sin neither speaks nor reads. Traditionally, a Chinese Buddhist funeral occurs three to seven days after the death. Since Sin and his father are out of contact, how is Sin even supposed to learn about the death in time much less fly to Hong Kong for the funeral?
Yee would have us accept that Sin is thus forced to learn Cantonese and gather a basic background in Buddhism in just a few days just to prepare the eulogy or risk having Sin’s father remain in the second bardo of the afterlife in Buddhism. But, since Sin is not a Buddhist, why should this alien system of the afterlife have any meaning for him? Does a Protestant offer up prayers to help a Catholic friend out of Purgatory when that is a place whose existence Protestants deny? Yee leaves us with Sin nonsensically being compelled to perform Buddhist rituals he knows nothing about in accordance with a will Kai refuses to translate. This amounts to an inordinate amount of trust that Sin has to place in Kai, who, oddly, is extremely strict about following the demands of Sin’s father even though Kai has resented Sin’s father all his life and even blames Sin father’s for causing his own father’s death.
If we can accept this extraordinarily muddled set-up, we still have to face the fact that Yee gives us no insight into any of his characters until the very end of the play. If the play were meant to be a mystery, the author would have to dole out bits of information piecemeal to help maintain the audience’s interest in the story. Here, Yee leaves essential information until the conclusion assuming that lack of knowledge will pique our interest. It doesn’t. In fact, not why knowing any of the characters do what they do makes us uninvolved and uninterested.
Sin and his father were estranged for 15 years with no communication between them. What caused it? We have to wait until the end and even then we are not told what specifically it was 15 years ago that made Sin leave home. Sin has an ex-girlfriend who appears mostly, as we discover too late, as an hallucination. What caused their breakup? We have to wait for the end. Worse, there is some information Yee never gives us. The title of the play is the same as the novel that Sin wrote, but we never learn what the novel is about. Sin seems to have adopted a negative trait from his father, but why did his father acquire it? Yee has Sin converse with his father’s ghost, so we could find out then, but we don’t.
Anyone expecting the kind of magic realism Yee displayed in his award-winning play carried away on the crest of a wave (2013) will be disappointed. There surrealism was part of the fabric of the play. Here there are surreal aspects but they feel like gimmicks since they contribute nothing to the forward movement of the story. Yee gives us a stuffed Paddington Bear, who talks a blue streak and a Buddhist monk (John Ng) who provides specious justification for drinking. The previously mentioned hallucinations of Nine and Sin’s father, supposedly caused by guilt, also tell us nothing useful. Director Nina Lee Aquino and lighting designer Michelle Ramsay have created a number of beautiful effects, such as golden sand pouring into one of Sin’s open suitcases or having one of Sin’s suitcases filled with water, but these images lead to no insight into the action except to the cliché that Sin carries a lot of baggage, emotional and physical, with him wherever he goes.
What makes the play watchable is that the cast make the most of their roles no matter how sketchily written. David Yee, onstage throughout the entire play, is an engaging performer. He shows us more doubt, anger and frustration roiling in Sin’s mind than Sin expresses. Yee also moves easily between comedy and seriousness as his script demands.
The role of Nine is pretty much a cipher, but Rosie Simon lends Nine a plucky , grounded personality that contrasts well with all the wavering of Yee’s Sin. Yee seems to give the character of Kai only the attributes of pedantry and love for men’s grooming products, but Richard Lee manages to give the character life even if Kai only becomes believable in the last quarter of the play. John Ng clearly distinguishes his many roles from disgruntled airline passenger to Paddington Bear to equivocating Buddhist monk. Perhaps his best role is the the ghost of Sin’s father where he appears far different from the monster we imagined. The meeting between Sin and his father is so well written that one wonders why Yee didn’t make this a recurring structural element of the play.
Besides its improbabilities, the central difficulty of Acquiesce is that the dramatic conflict is entirely internal. It is the battle between what Yee as a son in general feels he ought to do and what he as the son of this specific father would rather do. Mouthpiece shows a very similar conflict but writers Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken chose to divide their central character in two to make their play more dramatic. Yee, however, has followed a much more old-fashioned dramaturgy which does not suit the subject. Since the play shows an internal conflict, it would better have been presented as a one-person play with Yee playing all the roles and the two sides of his character. That at least would be more dramatic that scenes of silence, as when Sin laboriously washes his father body three times, when we are frustrated in wondering all the time what Sin is thinking.
The play concludes with Sin’s clichéd revelation that he is his “father’s son”. The problem here is that the play seems to deny that Sin’s mother had any influence on him at all. In fact, she is barely mentioned. Yee gives us no idea whether she died, left her husband or what. If it is the second, how is it she and Yee did not remain in contact?
Yee explains that he wrote Acquiesce in 2001 and two years later began hating it. The late dramaturge Iris Turcott forced him to resurrect the play. One can’t help but feel that Yee’s initial judgement was right. By carried away on the crest of a wave, he has moved on and learned how better to integrate realism with his love of surrealism. Acquiesce feels like a step backwards. Let’s hope this talented playwright rediscovers and further develops his voice in his next work.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) David Yee and John Ng; John Ng and David Yee; Richard Lee, David Yee and Rosie Simon. ©2016 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca.
2016-11-06
Acquiesce